8.26.2008

Selective Palette

Considering it took me nearly twenty years to accept lettuce as food, and that in college I once ordered “Chicken with Broccoli/hold the Broccoli” from a Chinese restaurant, no one can really accuse me of having a wide range of tastes. Still, when I saw this food list over at Antick Musings, I thought I'd try it anyway. Of the 100 items below, the ones in BOLD are the ones I've actually tried, while the ones with a strikethrough are things I wouldn't eat if my life depended on it. Let's see just how selective my palette really is:

Not surprisingly, out of 100 items I've actually tried 18, most of which I liked(except for the lox, cigar, and sauerkraut). I had to look up the majority of these items. In some cases I was surprised to read descriptions and think, “Well that sounds like something I'd try.” In others, I was shocked to learn, “That's so not bread!” I'd love to hear your reactions to this list and see how my tastes, or lack thereof, compare with your own. It’s a delicious world, but I apparently wouldn’t eat all of it.

I've had both snake and alligator. Snake tasted like sausage the way it was prepared. Good stuff. Alligator tasted like fish with the texture of steak. Um... EW! Now I hear that Whale has the taste of steak with the consistency of fish. THAT, my friends, is good eat'n!!!

Black pudding isn't too bad, if you don't think about the process of it being made or what goes into it. A bit like eating a McDonalds, I suppose! :-)

Aloo gobi and baba ghanoush are also quite nice. I married a vegetarian and while I haven't entirely given up meat, I do eat vegetarian 99% of the time and have been introduced to a lot of nice stuff that way. So there's your solution - go out there and meet a girl that's adventurous with her food, and hold on to her!

And I suppose as a Scot I have to make a defense of haggis. It's nice. Really nice. Done well it's lovely. And you can also get a vegetarian version of it, which removes some of the troubling considerations of what bits used to be what. ;-)

I ate sweetbreads once: there was a multicultural day on at University and I thought "Free food + day off from lectures = good!". I didn't know what they were at the time - I think if I had, I might have balked a bit at that one. Still, one of life's rich experiences eh?

MCF is a mild-mannered
artist from the suburbs.
His knowledge of obscure
comic book characters
is more powerful than Gladiator
of the Shi'ar Imperial Guard on
an ego-trip. Able to leap topics
in a single sentence faster than
a speeder-bike on the moon of
Endor, MCF has never written
about himself in the third person
and now dreads the day he
utters aloud the fateful phrase,
"MCF is gettin' upset!"